Twitter today announced that they will be wrapping all the links posted on tweets using their t.co short URL. They are doing this with claims about better security but I feel that it is bad from the ecosystem perspective and user perspective. To be specific, it is both anti-competitive and anti-user.

Tens of millions of links are tweeted on Twitter each day. Wrapping these shared links helps Twitter protect users from malicious content while offering useful insights on engagement. All links submitted within tweets and direct messages, regardless of length, will eventually be wrapped with t.co.

Let me argue why this is bad in this post. Feel free to chip in with your own POV.

First let us look at the advantages of this move

Like they have claimed, this will make it easy for them to offer better security

It will help them offer better analytics to the users

More importantly, it will help them monetize better (the bottom line behind this move)

Now, let me list out why I think it is a bad move

It will kill with a single stroke many of the services in Twitter ecosystem (anti-competitive)

For those brand conscious people, this takes away any opportunity to insert brands in their tweets (anti-user)

Privacy conscious people usually use multiple services to reduce the impact on their privacy. This gives too much user information in the hands of Twitter which is bad from the privacy point of view. Especially, when Twitter is being used by revolutionaries around the world, too much information in the hands of Twitter is not desirable (anti-user)

Ideally, a truly open platform is the best option for users. However, it doesn’t always happen because of user experience reasons. IMO, the user experience advantages gained by this move doesn’t alter the dynamics much because of existing offerings from the ecosystem players but it takes away the choice from the hands of users. (anti-choice)

Yes, I agree that this gives Twitter better handle in preventing security issues but they can as well do it without having to wrap the URLs with t.co. In short, t.co wrapper is not a necessity for better security

Anyhow, I get a bad taste that Twitter is fast moving towards a walled garden approach like AOL and Facebook. The biggest attraction of Twitter is the open nature of the underlying platform. Whether Twitter agrees it or not, the ecosystem players have contributed significantly to Twitter’s magnificent growth. Taking a walled garden approach might backfire in the long run. In fact, I would even claim that Twitter was part of many revolutions around the world due to its open nature where plugging in services to avoid censorship was easy. By restricting the openness of the platform (I agree this move is in no way a big restriction but I feel it is indicative of a trend), they might end up making Twitter useless for future revolutions. I think they should do a rethink of their business strategy. What do you say? Feel free to add your thoughts.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.

3 responses to “Twitter’s Walled Garden Strategy”

Krishnan, thanks for taking time to write the post but I wanted to make sure I clarify a few points that I think you misunderstood about the announcement.

– Branding – t.co only wraps the link passed in and then displays the original link to users. So if “http://nyti.ms/1234″ is the link getting shared (NYT’s brand) then t.co will wrap that but display “nyti.ms/1234″ to users, thus preserving the brand that was in the tweet.

– User experience – I think you’re underestimating the user experience gain for mainstream users. Previously users needed to go off-site to 3rd party services in order to share most links. Most mainstream users have no idea that bit.ly or other similar services exist, so they would just be told by twitter that their tweet was too long and give up. This causes huge friction when sharing. The new system makes it automatic while still preserving bit.ly and other shorteners if people want to use them.

– Competition – This is way overstated. Talk to bit.ly or awe.sm and ask how their business is doing. Both companies are thriving because they realized long ago that shortening links wasn’t a business. They instead built businesses around the analytics generated by their links across multiple services.

I am not against t.co as it is essentially standard behavior and most services do tracking (and security scans) during the redirect process even if they dont use a short url (i.e. Facebook).
The service has merits and was inevitable. Surprised it took so long, actually. I do have a gripe and maybe it is because I am not understanding how to get around it… but the branding issue using the display_url (not nec a url but the text string used for the hyperlink in the tweet) seems controlled by Twitter as opposed to being customizable via the API. Again, maybe I am wrong here so correct me if so. It appears that the display_url takes a certain amount of characters from the expanded_url which is in fact an actual URL. So the branding capability here is to use the source domain plus some extra characters before being truncated. That is fine is most cases where the domain is the most important part of the brand connected to a link. But what if a brand wants to use their actual company name not in domain format (i.e. “via The NY Times”) or a tagline (i.e. “Unrivaled coverage. Unlimited access.). Without making judgement on the brandability aesthetics of my examples, the point is that customizing how the brand is displayed in a tweet seems like a feature that would be important, if not now then eventually. Is it possible? If so, can you point to the documentation on how to post a status update via the API that demonstrates how to control the display_url used in the tweet itself?